McClane, John McClane

Yippee-ay-kay-ay! Willis' urban cowboy still has it

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, June 25, 2007

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is PC and Matt Farrell (Justin Long) is Mac in the latest odd couple from Hollywood.

John McClane (Bruce Willis) is PC and Matt Farrell (Justin Long) is Mac in the latest odd couple from Hollywood.

Photo: FRANK MASI

McClane, John McClane

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It has been more than 10 years since Bruce Willis played John McClane, the resilient old-school cop and sand in the gears of dastardly plots by evil geniuses. Now older, balder, more banged-up, he's just as dogged when an errand-run to pick up smartass hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) lands him in yet another elaborate scheme by a criminal mastermind.

This being the age of excess, the fourth "Die Hard" escalates the stakes from a single building ("Die Hard") or an airport held hostage ("Die Hard 2") to the complete structural breakdown of an entire nation: Transportation, communications, finances, power, even defense systems are all disabled and directed by a single super-genius (a blandly intense Timothy Olyphant) out for both the biggest cyber-crime theft in history and a somewhat extreme gesture of payback.

Director Len Wiseman, confidently stepping up from the smallish budget "Underworld" films to mega-budget Hollywood mainstream, opens the film crisply, and he effectively escalates the action from the sinister threat of keyboards clicking and data flashing on video screens to guns blazing and buildings blowing up. The scale of explosions and property damage only increases from there as Olyphant and crew (including a gorgeous and sleek Maggie Q) take on the tenacious McClane to get Farrell, a loose end in their cyber-terrorism scheme.

Where Willis once tossed off his sardonic comments with an "Ain't I cute" smirk, here he has the confidence (or maybe simply exhaustion) to just toss them out there with a gruff pugnacity. Shaggily amiable co-star Long plays well off Willis' urban cowboy of a veteran cop, which helps make up for the glaring absence of a dynamic villain. With no color or personality to Gabriel, Olyphant is left to flash his eyes and glare menacingly as he orders yet another strike force against McClane.

Like a lot of digital-age thrillers, the film treats computer hacking and digital systems as a kind of cyber-magic, in which spells are hacked in seconds with a few keystrokes pounded out like some voodoo drumbeat. And it relies on the distraction of action to hide the plot potholes, which Wiseman fulfills with a mix of impressive stunt-work (love the gymnast hit men) and ambitious set-piece spectacles that start to overwhelm as the film keeps topping itself with high-concept overkill.

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Sure, a Harrier jet chasing a big rig down an elevated freeway (it doesn't remain elevated for long) sounds like a great idea, but it's finally just another obstacle to a mission that has (as tradition dictates in such things) become personal.

But there's still something cinematically satisfying in seeing the veteran street cop McClane plugging along like a dogged boxer against a younger and stronger opponent, scraping himself back up after every knockdown out of sheer resilience.

He's no superhero, just a banged-up veteran held together by his scar tissue and roused to action because he's the guy in the place to do so. That's what makes this analog sentinel in a digital world such a riveting hero.